How the Monoculture Made Zohran Mamdani

The young socialist who will likely be New York’s next mayor was raised in a series of far-left echo chambers

Imagine if New Yorkers really do end up making Zohran Mamdani their next mayor.

Imagine that the most influential city in the world’s most influential nation would be led by a socialist. Imagine the massive propaganda boost the world’s socialists would enjoy. By November 5, Mamdani would reign as the top socialist executive in the nation known for capitalism.

On his way to winning the Democratic nomination, journalists examined Mamdani’s youth, his charisma, his big smile, the rap song he made about his grandma — they even spent some time on his policy positions. But the media remained largely uncurious about one very big question: Why is Mamdani so confident in his socialist beliefs?

It would be an understatement to say I’m not a fan of socialism, but today I won’t examine the pros and cons of that worldview. Today I’m putting all that aside. Today I’m wondering if the 33-year-old Mamdani has ever really had to defend his worldview against intelligent anti-socialists. Has his worldview been battle-tested or is it the product of intellectual coddling?

Let’s take a quick tour of the steps that brought him to where he is today.

His Mom and Dad

Mamdani’s parents represent two monoculture strongholds, academia and entertainment. Dad is a Columbia University professor and mom is an Academy Award-nominated film director.

Let’s consider dad first.

Mahmood Mamdani operates within a monoculture that runs three layers deep. It’s not just that he works in academia where monocultures are the norm, or that he works in the Ivy League where monocultures are often particularly lopsided. It’s that he works in a discipline — anthropology — where centrists, conservatives, and libertarians have all but gone extinct.

One analysis of tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors in 51 top-ranked liberal arts colleges found zero registered Republicans among anthropologists. (It just so happens I know a non-leftist Ph.D. in anthropology, but she’s turned away from academia’s intolerance and now works in a different field. Perhaps someone should start a museum devoted to such dodos of the academy, so that future students will know that such creatures once roamed their campuses.)

Source

Now let’s turn to the mother of the man who will likely be New York’s next mayor.

Mira Nair has helmed films such as Mississippi Masala starring Denzel Washington, Amelia starring Hilary Swank and Ewan McGregor, and Vanity Fair starring Reese Witherspoon. In addition to attracting A-list actors, her films attract top-tier distributors (including Disney and Fox Searchlight) and the most exclusive film festivals (such as Cannes and TIFF).

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career in the film industry, and have written extensively about its intellectually incestuous climate. It’s a climate that often mirrors the campus climate. In fact, Nair’s highest-grossing film (2001’s Monsoon Wedding — global box office: $30 million) was conceived at her husband’s Ivy League campus (the screenwriter wrote it while at Columbia’s MFA film program). It’s another piece of evidence that supports my claim that the entertainment industry and academia share the same brain.

---

Related

• Harvard and Sundance Share the Same Brain: 8 things the elite institutions have in common

• How the Monoculture Made "Super Size Me": Morgan Spurlock’s Untimely Death and Gatekeepers’ Refusal to Call Out Film Fakery

• Zohran Mamdani vs. Larry Elder: Which Candidate Is Too Extreme for the Media? Does the “black face of white supremacy” ring a bell?

• Don't Let Clooney and Company Fool You: Hollywood Isn’t Merely Shallow

• Hollywood to America: What’ll It Be — Progressive Propaganda or Mindless Popcorn Flicks?

• Sorry Bernie, Workers Just Aren’t That Into You: May Day rhetoric vs. Foot Day reality

• Don’t Expect Student Protesters to Embrace Oppressed Venezuelans: The selectively compassionate defend the “correct” kind of marginalized people

Nobody Told the Oscars That the Madness Is Over

---

His Neighborhood

After arriving in the U.S. when Zohran was seven, his family settled in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of America’s toniest neighborhoods. It also happens to be one of America’s bluest. I can speak to that first hand.

My first job out of college was working for ABC Network News at their headquarters on Columbus Avenue. I moved to the Upper West Side the same year the Mamdanis arrived, and our stay in the neighborhood probably overlapped for about five years.

It’s possible I stood in line with the Mamdanis at the grocery store, but they’re probably more of a Zabar’s family. I could barely afford to live in the neighborhood (I rented a room, not an apartment), so I frequented stores like Sloan’s, where the red meat was brown and the employees were surly. Once, while waiting in an absurdly slow line, I witnessed a frustrated customer ask an employee to open another checkout counter. The employee responded by challenging the customer to a fight. The customer declined the offer.

Back then in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was producing for John Stossel, the only libertarian correspondent in network news at the time (or probably ever). The Stossel Unit existed as a small oddball department within a giant corporate monoculture. At work and around town, I received regular reminders that my kind wasn’t welcome in those parts.

So I can personally attest to the suffocating intellectual conformity, but you don’t have to take my word for it. This map of the Upper West Side’s political leanings is worth a thousand words.

His College

After being raised in an intellectually-cocooned neighborhood by two parents who work in two intellectually-cocooned industries, it was eventually time for young Zohran to head to college. He chose another intellectually-cocooned environment, Bowdoin College in Maine, where the Democrat to Republican faculty ratio stands at 54 to 1. Perhaps Zohran encountered some non-leftist instructors, but considering his major — Africana Studies — he likely experienced a monoculture at least as homogenous as the typical Bowdoin student.

Source

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression gives Bowdoin low marks for tolerance of non-leftist views, and the anonymous students quoted by FIRE describe a campus where the fundamentalist mindset extends to the student body.

One student chose to remain silent during a classroom discussion about immigration, saying:

It's not that their opinions differed from mine, it's that they bashed my opinions before I even stated them. One student even called Republicans 'the scum of the earth.' In NO WAY was I going to find the confidence to share my opinions in the middle of class.

Another student says the Israel-Hamas War has become an extremely one-sided debate:

Basically everyone with a brain agrees that Israel should stop attacking Palestine, but the vocal majority say that Hamas is a virtuous group and that the terroristic bombings they do at hospitals and schools are perfectly fine. My school stopped advertising their Hanukkah events due to fear of social persecution, which I find extremely sad.

Bowdoin’s intellectual environment is so stiflingly conformist that even its president admitted it was a problem — too bad he apparently wasn’t moved enough to do anything about it.

emrata

A post shared by @emrata

His Work Environment

After graduating from Bowdoin and working briefly as a housing counselor and hip hop artist, Zohran settled into yet another monoculture, the New York City political scene. His political career began as a campaign manager, but he quickly won political office himself. By age 29, he was a state representative, and he won re-election in 2022 and 2024 without opposition.

Although Mamdani debated other candidates during the Democratic mayoral primary race, he never had to contend with intelligent non-leftists. Moreover, today’s political debates represent a phony form of intellectual exchange. There’s lots of gesticulating and raised voices, but it’s all little more than debate theater.

Of course, my jaunt through Mamdani’s intellectual upbringing might miss important details. Maybe he has sought out intelligent anti-socialist interlocutors throughout his life. Maybe dogeared books by F.A. Hayek clutter his nightstand. Or maybe he really is just a product of the many echo chambers that raised him.

It's time for the media to get curious about why this dashing young politician is so confident in his socialism.

It’s not enough to point to social media spats, morning show soundbites, or interviews with credulous podcasters. New Yorkers and onlookers around the world deserve to know: Does Zohran Mamdani really know what he’s talking about or is he merely regurgitating what he’s overheard from his parents, his neighbors, his professors, his classmates, and his colleagues?

Maybe the mind of the man who may soon become the world’s most famous socialist is like the innermost figure of a Russian nesting doll set — shielded from the outside, protected from reality.